the north transept of the Abbey from the point of view of the crossing of the nave. He scaled down the proportions to fit the lens width available to him; nevertheless, the finished set was still too large for his studio, and was therefore set up outdoors, against the wall of his own garden in Montreuil. Méliès, never one to waste scenery, reused the thrones and armchairs built for the set in numerous later films, including Tunnelling the English Channel and The Palace of the Arabian Nights. Méliès filmed two takes of the coronation, one for British distribution by Warwick and one for American distribution by the Biograph Company; during the editing process, he swapped the endings of the two takes, probably to provide British viewers with the most accurate possible account of the ceremony. Later, when his studio set up an American office, Méliès took up the practice of filming two negatives simultaneously, one for domestic markets and one for copyright in New York. Release and reception The film was completed on 21 June, in time for the scheduled ceremony on the 26th. However, on the 24th, Edward was diagnosed with appendicitis. The disease carried a high mortality rate, and operations for it were not in common use, but surgery using recently developed techniques of anaesthesia and antisepsis was possible. Frederick Treves, supported by Joseph Lister, successfully treated the illness using the then-unconventional method of draining the abscess through an incision, and Edward's health began to return by the next day. With the king's life successfully saved, the coronation was moved to 9 August. The film was postponed accordingly, and premiered on the evening of Coronation Day at the Alhambra Theatre in London. Urban set up a camera at the actual coronation to capture the arrival and departure of the carriages before and after the ceremony, adding these shots to the beginning and end of Méliès's film to increase its verisimilitude. (The footage of the carriages is presumed lost, though a few stills from the arrival film survive in the BFI National Archive in London.) Because of Edward's fatigued recovery from illness, some parts of the ceremony shown in the film were omitted from the actual coronation. Unlike most of Méliès's films, The Coronation of Edward VII was not advertised in the catalogues of his Star Film Company, but was sold by Urban's Warwick Trading Company, as well as